The Blood is the Life! In Which I Rant. Again.

Fresh Squeezings From the veins of the Internet

We are having a beer festival at work. I may have mentioned this once or twice already LOL. burlesque_bunny and I decorated the pub earlier, and there is much beer available, and I will be VERY busy over the next few days. If I don't answer your email or comment, therefore, please don't take it personally.

Misogyny News:size zero girls are unattractive, but so are fat girls, so unless you are BANG ON NORMAL you are doomed to a life of miserable singledom, and people pointing and laughing at you in the street. Certainly you won't be able to have a busy and fulfilling sex life with a variety of attractive and talented partners like wot I do.

when you said ‘I do’ you said ‘I do’ to sex as well. Sex is part of the bargain if you expect your partner to remain married to you and faithful to you.... Your husband has a right to expect regular sex and ‘duty shags’, I’m afraid, are all part of the ‘working at the relationship’ that experts rattle on about

It's like 1992 never happened, isn't it? What, you thought spousal rape had been illegal in the UK for longer than 17 years? Nup. And even that is only case law. Could easily be overturned by an Act of Parliament. Still, all the battles of feminism are won, aren't they? [/heavy sarcasm]

what are the democratic and political reforms you most want from the next Parliament?

STV. That's all I want. Well, it's not ALL I want, but pretty much everything else I want will either follow naturally from it, or will be made easier to get by it. There have been several Lib Dems saying I'm not going to be predictable and say STV, I'm going to say *insert airy-fairy idea here* instead, but I think that would be wasting the opportunity. Electoral Reform is THE most important topic of the moment; and STV is a panacea for a huge number of the problems with our democracy. So yeah, give me STV or give me death. Or, you know, gin so I can cope with the lack of STV.

As usual, I'm not tagging anyone, but I would particularly like to see NON-politics bloggers have a go at this one.

RE: Watford - huh? I don't really know how to react to that. It's the Daily Fail so I just want to cry out 'bullshit' but who the hell knows. Also, sounds like comments and what was actually done as been spun and spun and spun until it ceases to be truth anymore. Chinese whispers gone mad I think.

RE: Bracknell Blog - thats twice I've seen that advertised (one by the people who run it and you) tis a small world XD

I bang on about STV so much on my blog that I thought I would eschew the obvious and well documented support I have for it and try and explore a few other ideas. I agree though that lots of other good things would flow from having STV implemented and it is the most important change.

I also think trying to get input from non-political bloggers would be great. Why do you not want to tag anyone specifically?

I think that the Tracy Cox article is badly paraphrasing some things that Dan Savage said.

Essentially, his point is that marriage does not give anyone the right to unilaterally end someone else's sex life. Sex is something that people reasonably expect in a relationship, the same as people expect to have someone to converse with, the same as people expect to have someone to go along to horrible obligatory social events.

So here's my take on it. Socially - sex is bad and evil and only bad, evil people do it, so it's often socially acceptable if one partner just completely ends the bad, evil sex.

Except that really, sex is neither bad nor evil, and the desire for sex is normal. It is completely and absolutely reasonable to expect sex within a relationship unless it's made very clear early on (definitely before marriage vows) that sex will not be a component to the relationship. If a husband suddenly stopped speaking to and listening to his spouse, because he had "just gone off chatting" for a while, no one would be as understanding.

I expect sex in my relationship. I do not expect my partner to be available to me on demand, but I do expect that he be available occasionally. Quite honestly, if "it" stopped working, I would still expect my partner to find alternative ways to be sexual, or if that didn't appeal to him at all, I would expect that he would let me seek physical gratification elsewhere.

The woman who wrote the letter - she's talking about her partner. Someone that she hopefully likes enough to figure out a way that they're both happy to be around each other, the same as anyone would do for any friend. Better advice would have been to tell her that she needs to either find ways to compromise on sex, OR ELSE allow him find sex elsewhere under terms that they can both live with.

About This Blog

Hello! I'm Jennie (known to many as SB, due to my handle, or The Yorksher Gob because of my old blog's name). This blog is my public face; click here for a list of all the other places you can find me on t'interwebs.

Please note that any and all opinions expressed in this blog are subject to random change at whim my own, and not necessarily representative of my party, or any of the constituent parts thereof (except myself, obviously).